Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
iv + 35 + iii folios on paper, watermarks with the name of the papermaker and a circular design (illegible apart from a crown and a capital A), original pagination in red ink, 1-64 (one unnumbered leaf at the beginning and two at the end), complete (collation probably i-iv10 (including the 5 flyleaves on ordinary paper)), ruled in hard point (space inside the frame 162 x 93 mm.), stenciled in black, red, blue and green inks in fine and large Roman letters in on 10 long lines, rubrics in red, blue and green, 2-line initials ornamented throughout the book with a rich variety of floral and foliage, ornamental frame on each page, five floral headpieces and four large symbolic tailpieces (culs-de-lampe) with the Dove of the Holy Spirit, the chalice and the host, all decoration made with stencils in rich watercolors, liquid gold and silver, in overall excellent condition. In a CONTEMPORARY PARISIAN BINDING of tan morocco finely gold tooled “à la Du Seuil,” spine with five raised bands, gold tooled with fleurs-de-lis surmounted by crowns, flowers, stars, dots, and foliage, entitled in gilt “MESSE,” with red morocco inlay gold tooled with a large lace frame with fleurs-de-lis, corner fleurons, marbled endpapers with blue silk inlays, gilt edges, pink silk ribbon place-marker, in overall excellent condition. Dimensions 208 x 138 mm.
Excellent, skillful example of an illustrated stenciled manuscript that showcases the aesthetic taste popular during the reign of King Louis XV. Beautiful letterforms, elegant floral and foliage arabesques on high quality paper, are housed in an original gold-tooled binding. Surely this luxury volume was completed for a noble woman at the French court, as was its sister manuscript in the Morgan Library and Museum. Stencil books occupy a fascinating middle ground between manuscript and print.
1. The book was made in Cambrai in 1738, as stated on the titlepage. It is very similar to another stenciled book of the same text made in the same year, 1738, in Cambrai, for a widowed lady née Landier (New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.148; see Online Resources). According to its description (no images are available on the Morgan website), the luxury of the script and illustration in the Landier book is entirely comparable to our volume, and the two books were undoubtedly made by the same artisans. The Landier book was also bound very finely in a mosaic binding by the king’s binder, Antoine-Michel Padeloup. The covers of our book are expertly gold tooled in a style known in bibliography since the nineteenth century as “à la Du Seuil” (although nothing to do with the eighteenth-century binder Augustin Duseuil). More research is needed to discover the makers and first owners of these two books made in Cambrai in 1738, but it seems likely that they were made for noble ladies of the French court.
2. In the library of the Château de Courtalain, which belonged for a long time to the house of Montmorency before passing to the Gontaut-Biron family; ex-libris inscription of the Gontaut family at the top of the second front flyleaf.
3. Sold as part of the Trésors de la bibliothèque des ducs de Montmorency in 2022, no. 40.
[unnumbered titlepage], “Élévation durant la t[rès] sainte messe A Cambrai M. D.C.C. XXX.VIII”;
pp. 1-64, [Liturgy for the Elevation during Mass from the Missal], incipit, “Élévation durant la sainte messe ... durant toute l’Eternité. Ainsi soit-il”; [followed by two unnumbered leaves with stenciled frames, but without text].
The text in this liturgical book comprises the prayers said before, during, and after the elevation, which is the ritual of raising the Sacred Body and Blood of Christ, that is the consecrated host and chalice, during the celebration of the Eucharist as part of the Mass. The priest shows the host and chalice to the congregation by raising them one by one above his head, without turning around, so that people may adore them. As Eamon Duffy states, discussing the origin of this practice during the Middle Ages, “The Host was something to be seen, not to be consumed, the high point of lay experience of the Mass” (Duffy 1992, pp. 95-96).
The text is inscribed on the pages using stencils. Traditionally in France stencils were called “lettres à jour,” because the letters pierced on metal let the daylight shine through. Although the use of stencils goes back thousands of years, the type of stenciling to produce texts in Roman letters, as found in our book, is attested since the seventeenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. It was used especially in the eighteenth century in France and Germany to produce liturgical books. The method was particularly suited for making large Choir Books, the size of which was less compatible with the printing press. Commercial commodities such as playing cards were also produced with the help of stencils. In stenciling, the text was inscribed on paper manually letter by letter, with paint applied with a brush through the stencil. The product was thus a hybrid, the result of a combination of manual and mechanical methods, neither a printed book, nor a traditional manuscript. Technically it can be called a manuscript because the imprint on the page is made by hand, albeit using an instrument to shape the form of the imprint. In the eighteenth century, one could buy stenciled alphabets and owning a small-scale personal stencil was not uncommon. For more on the history and working methods of stenciling texts, see especially the publications of Eric Kindel, a specialist in this subject (Literature and Online Resources).
According to Gilles Filleau des Billettes, who wrote in Paris in the 1690s, the process of stenciling was invented around 1650; the method was used especially for the liturgical books of individual churches, as there was no need for larger diffusion of these very specific texts by means of printing (Kindel, 2013, p. 166 and François, 2010). Fischer van Waldheim, writing around 1800, suggested that stencils were invented by a Trappist monk in 1674.
A notable feature of the book described here, is that the letters appear continuous, without the breaks characteristic of most letters formed with stencils (stencil templates of many letters necessarily included bridges or attachments to keep the shape from falling apart, and these then caused gaps or breaks in the stenciled letter). Gilles Filleau de Billettes discusses this describing these blank spaces as imperfections, that were sometimes (imperfectly in his words) remedied by filling in the gaps by hand. He goes on to describe a rather complex method of producing pairs of templates for the same letter form, which with careful placement could be combined in a way that eliminated breaks (see Kindel, 2013, pp. 34, 174, and 185-6).
The decorative elements in this book are equally noteworthy; the pagination, decorated initials, decorated borders, line endings, and symbolic illustrations were all made with stencils. Very similar stenciled decoration is found in an Antiphonal made at the convent of Minims in Marseille in 1763, conserved today at the Ganagobie Monastery (see Elms Pastel in Online Resources).
Constantinou, Meghan. “A Secular Stenciled Book: The Library Catalogue of Charles-Antoine de Billy, 1742–ca 1760,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society, third series 2 (2021), pp. 170-201
Duffy, E. Stripping of the Altars, New Haven, 1992.
François, C.-L. “Les lettres réalisées au pochoir,” Histoire de l’écriture typographique, de Gutenberg à nos jours, vol. 2.1, Le XVIIIe siècle, ed. Yves Perrousseaux, Gap, Atelier Perrousseaux, 2011, pp. 48-77.
Harper, J. The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy, Oxford, 1991.
Hugues, A. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology, Toronto, 1982.
Kindel, Eric, transcription and trans., “The description of stencilling by Gilles Filleau des Billettes,” Typography papers 9, ed. E. Kindel and P. Luna (2013), pp. 66-86.
Kindel, Eric. “Recollecting Stencil Letters, ”Typography Papers 5 (2003), pp. 65-101.
Kindel, Eric. “A Reconstruction of Stencilling Based on the Description by Gilles Filleau des Billettes,” Typography Papers 9, ed. E. Kindel and P. Luna (2013), pp. 28-65.
O’Meara, E. J. “Notes on Stencilled Choir-Books,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1933), pp. 169-185.
Platelle, H., A. Lottin, L. Trénard and P. Pierrard. Histoire des diocèses de Cambrai et de Lille, Paris, 1978.
Plummer, J. Liturgical Manuscripts for the Mass and Divine Office, New York, 1964.
Schrott, G. “Schablonierte Choralbücher. Buchgeschichtliche Entdeckungen auf den zweiten Blick,” in Ordensgeschichte. Ein interdisziplinäres Gemeinschaftsblog zur Geschichte von Klöstern und Orden, 2019.
Eric Kindel, “Stencil: a descriptive bibliography,” Reading, 2019
https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/90582/1/Kindel%20Stencil%20a%20descriptive%20bibliography%202019.pdf
New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.148
https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/77072
Blondina Elms Pastel, “On the path of stencilled liturgical books”
https://www.atelierelms.com/typote-design-workshops/blog/2017/07/26/on-the-path-of-stencilled-liturgical-books/
TM 1312
